ARE YOU REALLY WORKING HARD ENOUGH?

“The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.”

Those were the words of President Trump at his inauguration.  Yes those were the words of President Trump at his inauguration. Have you noticed, whether for emphasis or whatever, he repeats himself….constantly saying the same thing twice.

“The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.”

There you go again.

So is the USA embarked on four years of blood, sweat and toil? Will Trump be dragging people back to sweaty manual labour like coal mining whilst the rest of us are in driverless cars moving towards the inevitable digital economy?

In Japan this week there was something of a panic surrounding people working too hard. 50 hour weeks, they say, are killing people. They’re considering stopping work at 3pm every Friday so people can go shopping and stimulate the economy. Yet 50 hours is only a five days from 8am to 6pm. Every executive I know does at least that.

The myth that any work in excess of 40 hours a week is counter-productive is as arbitrary as the weekly alcohol limit of 14 units for men and women unless you’re Spanish and male when it’s 35 units. “Aclamaciones!!”

Hunter/Gatherers in the distant past only worked a 22 hour week. And now some of us are envisaging a virtually work free life waited upon by good looking robots. But I actually don’t get what all the fuss is about. If you get it even vaguely right there is hardly any distinction between work and play.

But there are times when being a workaholic just seems misplaced. I recently heard about a friend who had undergone heroic surgery on his heart. I asked how he was doing to be told he was not doing all that well especially as his recent promotion meant he had to work even harder.

Like that lady in a senior post in Intel saying: “I have this work/life balance thing nailed.
It’s work, work, work.” But acting busy rather than enjoying being busy is tiresome.  Alpha Go is an Artificial Intelligence system owned by Google. Against expectation it beat the “Go” World Champion Lee Sedol recently. Philosopher Mark Rowlands got it perfectly when he described the game at its most intense:
“There is the joy of focus, the experience of being completely immersed in what one is doing.”

And that’s what real work is like.

Leisure on the other hand can be rather boring. Read a Jane Austen novel and reflect on how tedious having nothing much to do in 1800 was for many of what are the now-busy middle class. Certainly small town social politics in places like Chawton where she spent the last twelve years of her life seems rather depressing.
The real trick is in wanting to do what you have to do. Because involvement is always better than being disengaged.

Just as Barack Obama will already be discovering.

SUCH GREAT EXPECTATIONS

The Stones sang “We can’t always get what we want” and that gap between what we want and get in life is widening. Tell people anything is possible and they reply “OK then - where is it?”

One student launched into a rant when Christakis Yale was rocked last November by a row between some undergraduates and the Master of Silliman College over their demands that frightening Halloween costumes be banned. The Master said he wanted to allow free speech but Jerelyn Luther (above) the most vociferous of the protesters told him “to shut the f*** up” and added: “Be quiet! In your position as master it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman.”

I checked Yale’s website but “comfort and home” don’t get a mention. This appears instead:  “Yale College provides a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual curiosity, independent thinking, and leadership skills.”

All the kerfuffle about free speech and “safe places” represents an expectation on the part of students that the Universities meet at their peril.

Driverless cars were in the news recently when a Google car had an accident with a bus. But the Wall Street Journal remains a fan of driverless because they tell us: “Taken together, the costs of automotive death and delay equal 2.6% of American GDP.”

My concern is going by this we’ll get bored. What’s next? A winter holiday skiing on autopilot, a book-free library - summaries of everything provided instead. I once saw the hilarious “Reduced Shakespeare Company,” three men preforming the whole Shakespeare canon in less than two hours. Is this the future?
Our expectations that technology will deliver a rich and leisure filled world are disappointed with more people working very hard.

Our expectations of the Arab Spring were, at its outset, generally high, as Palestinian businessman Munib Masri said in 2013: "I think the Arab Spring is the best thing that has happened in this part of the world and we need to give it time…”

Yet now over 180,000 deaths and 6 million refugees later I don’t think these expectations have been met.  We are instead seeing, as Al Jazeera put it :- “the fallen leaves of the Arab Spring”. (Syrian Tammam Azzam is the artist.)

And finally those wanting to exit the EU also have great expectations. Here’s a typical view: -

 “We don’t need the EU draining away our self-confidence, stoic resilience and resources when we could do so much better as our forebears did, standing on our own two feet”

I’ve tried to understand their argument but I can’t. I just don’t get it. When have we ever had so much collective wealth and created such amazing ideas?

Yet they have great expectations of the unknown. Perhaps they just hate foreigners? Perhaps they believe we could do better although history says not.

Paul Cook, the drummer of the Sex Pistols, got it about right when he said:-
“Coming out would be like going back to little England.”